Letting Their Guard Down : Champs Camp Gives Young Burn Victims a Chance to Be Themselves

WONDER VALLEY, Calif. —  They are just like any other kids at summer camp: playful, brooding, energetic, not quite in control of their emotions.

But they are different, too.

Chadwick, a bubbly 8-year-old whose spindly arms and legs are a constant blur of motion, has deep scars over most of his small body.

Chrissy, 14, a little boy crazy and more than a little mistrustful of authority figures, tires of the taunts and stares she gets at school because of her disfigured face.

And Elda, also 14, who gossips and giggles and sings the latest pop tunes, almost always folds her damaged left arm under her right to hide it from strangers.

Because they have been burned--sometimes by accident, sometimes intentionally, sometimes by a parent--young burn survivors often lead lonely, isolated lives, cut off from others by their scars and by people’s fear of what they don’t understand.

Last week, 160 burned children ages 5 through 18 from across the state--including many from Los Angeles--arrived at a camp in the foothills above Fresno designed especially for them. For some, it was the first time they felt comfortable stripping down to their swim trunks in public, and the only time they’d seen other kids as badly burned as they were.

The weeklong Champs Camp, the largest for burn victims in California, has been designed as an island of sorts--a place where burns and scars and the need for a special lotion that seeps into skin lacking pores are normal.

Perhaps fittingly, it is held at a place called Wonder Valley.

“We feel we can be ourselves here,” said Elda Sam, who was left with third-degree burns on her arm and several fingers lost after a fiery car accident when she was just 3. “We don’t have to hide anything. Away from here, we do.”

As the burn survivors waited for the camp’s buses at a Burbank fire station, it was difficult to tell where, or even if, many had been burned. With their long-sleeved shirts, baseball caps and buttoned collars, they had become experts at concealment.

As Elda stood waiting, she was her public self: shy, standing alone, doing her best to conceal her scars.

But by the second day of camp, Elda, who will be a freshman at Reseda High School this fall, had attracted a crowd of girlfriends and several male admirers, and had packed away her long-sleeved shirts in favor of sleeveless blouses.

“At school, they look at you funny,” she said, cradling her left arm again. “And they whisper about you. They don’t think I can hear, but I do. . . . I hear what they say.”

Camp counselors say children who were intentionally burned carry the most severe emotional scars.

At this year’s camp, for instance, there is a 12-year-old who was set aflame by his father. A 7-year-old was home when his father committed suicide by burning the house down; the boy suffered third-degree burns over most of his body.

Though the older children usually don’t bring up their injuries, the younger campers are often quite open about how they got burned, sometimes upsetting adults with their honesty.

In their second afternoon at the camp, for instance, an 11-year-old tells another young survivor: “My father burned me.” “How come?” his friend asks. But before he can answer, a counselor rushes the boys off in separate directions.

The idea is for the campers to forget their troubles and have fun, camp officials say.

“Most of these kids, when other people have summer vacations, they go to the hospital for skin grafts and surgery,” said Stephanie Knizek, associate executive director of the Canoga Park-based Alisa Ann Ruch California Burn Foundation, which runs the camp. “These kids have all had a major fight,” she said. “The pain is excruciating. This is really their chance to be kids and not worry about anything except to have a good time.”

Champs Camp is a place where the word can’t is not an accepted response.

A teen-ager, missing most of his right arm, propels himself across a rope suspended 15 feet above the ground. Another camper quietly slips off his prosthetic arm and leg and glides effortlessly across a swimming pool. Other children go horseback riding, race dirt bikes, shoot bows and arrows.

“I get sick and tired of people telling you, ‘You can’t do it,’ ” said camp counselor Willard Nelson, who goes by the camp name ‘Capt. Hook’ because of the artificial arm he has worn since suffering an electrical burn. “People need to look past the physical stuff and give us a chance to try. That’s all we want.”

Though the camp’s activities are similar to summer camps everywhere, some things are unique to Champs Camp:

As the children arrive, counselors line an entrance, giving the kids high fives, pats on the back and long hugs. Food is especially plentiful and calorie-laden because burn victims need to eat more while they are healing. A doctor and a physical therapist are at the camp. Because most campers take some type of prescribed medication, there is also a dispensary.

Because people who have suffered third-degree burns have no pores where they are scarred--making it impossible for them perspire and thus thwarting their bodies’ natural cooling systems--the children shower twice a day or spend long hours in the swimming pools.

The camp has even set up a supply store where children who do not have the necessary supplies can stock up for free.

“Some kids come here with nothing but a bag of dirty clothes, and even those are useless for camp,” said Marilyn Erickson, who supplies the store with donated T-shirts, jeans, underwear, bras, shampoo and other essentials.

But even as the counselors try to keep the outside world at bay, it creeps in.

One morning, a 17-year-old camper from Burbank, who counselors said was a gang member, broke a younger teen-ager’s nose at breakfast after the younger boy refused to give up his seat. The injured boy was sent to the dispensary and the other boy was eventually taken away in handcuffs by a local sheriff’s deputy.

“He had had problems with violence before, but we had talked until 1 a.m., and I thought things were OK,” his counselor, Tony Slimick, said afterward. Later, Slimick learned that the boy had been arrested 18 times and had served an eight-month jail sentence for attacking someone with a firebomb.

“I feel bad about him being kicked out, but this has to be a safe place,” Slimick said.

The camp is free, and many of the children come from low-income families that could not afford to send their kids to places like Wonder Valley, where other vacationers pay as much as $1,400 a week to use the 50 cabins and bungalows, swimming pools, boating lake and horse-riding facilities.

The private, nonprofit Burn Foundation is funded primarily through donations and sponsorships, including contributions from fire departments around the state. The foundation was started in 1971 by the parents of an 8-year-old Van Nuys girl who died in a back-yard barbecue accident.

Though the foundation also provides educational and counseling programs, the camp is its primary activity. Kids from Palm Desert to Petaluma have made the trek since Champs Camp began seven years ago, many returning for several consecutive summers from childhood to adolescence.

The camp property’s owner, Fresno County Supervisor Stan Oken, said he gives the Burn Foundation reduced rates, in part because of his own near-death experience: In 1981, he was stuck on a 22nd-floor stairwell during a hotel fire.

“It was close enough where I didn’t think I was going to make it out,” Oken said. “I was not burned, but I understand the fear of possibly being burned.”

The 86 counselors are volunteers, mostly firefighters, but also teachers, police officers, even a stockbroker. They live in the cabins with the campers, and are urged to give frequent hugs and otherwise make the camp a place that bears little resemblance to the dysfunctional home life of some of the children.

“This might be the only time during the year they get any affection,” said counselor Mitchell Martinez, a firefighter with the El Monte Fire Department. “We at least want to make a difference for them, if only for a week.”

Counselors are taught not to express shock at the children’s burns, but privately, they grieve.

“I remember standing there with sunglasses on, and when I saw the kids getting off the buses, I started crying,” said Liz Rodriguez, a recruiting assistant at Stanford University, who has worked as a camp counselor for five summers.

“I didn’t know how I would be with the kids,” she said, describing her first trip to Wonder Valley. “But once one of them approaches you, there’s no hesitation. You know you’re going to be able to handle it. Still, it’s hard sometimes.”

Counselor Jan Bernard, a Los Angeles fire captain burned during last year’s Malibu-Calabasas fire when flames overran his crew’s truck in a Chatsworth canyon, said the young campers have it much tougher than he does.

“There are times when I thought I had it rough, but I look at these kids and I realize they are going to spend their whole lives that way,” said Bernard, 46, who continues to recover from third-degree burns, which kept him at the Sherman Oaks Burn Center for months.

Parents said the camp boosts their children’s self-esteem.

Brenda Gordon, Chadwick’s mother, said Champs Camp has helped both her son and the rest of the family deal with the boy’s burns. Chadwick has been to the camp four times.

“He looks forward to it like a birthday party,” she said. “I think it reminds him that there’s nothing he can’t do that anyone else can. I mean, look at the way he wears shorts with his little bony legs.”

Chadwick was burned as a toddler when his twin sister, who was playing with matches inside a closet, started a fire that virtually destroyed the family’s Sylmar house. Chadwick spent two months in the hospital, with burns over 45% of his body. His sister, however, escaped injury--a lucky break that once was hard for Chadwick to accept. Camp helped him come to terms with it, Gordon said.

Anticipating her son’s return from this year’s trip to Wonder Valley, she said: “The camp certainly helps. . . . Now we’re going to have to hear about it for the next three months.”